Lost & Found

April '07

Lost & Found from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Bird watching
It looks like the founds outnumber the losts this month. Not one, but two readers wrote in to tell us about the Reliant collection in Guilford, Maine, that we featured in the February issue. J. Allan Cobb of Louisville, Kentucky, who sent in these photos, writes that he used to visit "the 'nest of Robins,' as we called it," when vacationing at Sebec Lake, near Guilford. "One day I was early and decided to ask around about the cars. Here is the story," writes Cobb: "An 'eccentric' gentleman from Guilford, Maine, had the idea of refurbishing and reselling these vehicles. In fact, he even had a factory and the tooling to completely refurbish Robins. Well, he died and his family had no interest in his grandiose plans. So, the factory and the cars are just sitting there waiting for an owner. In addition to the approximately 20 cars sitting outside the factory, there are a number of cars sitting in the factory. A lot of the cars are in pretty good shape."

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From Roger Beaudoin comes an e-mail with a slightly different tale: "The cars are located in Sangerville, Maine, near Dexter on the way to Moosehead Lake," he writes. "They are owned by a Mr. Charley MacArthur. I understand that the cars were used by a marketing company in New York for advertising purposes, but parts were no longer available and Charley started to collect them. Apparently, Mr. MacArthur planned on driving one up the Mount Washington Auto Road, but I'm not sure if this ever happened." He gave us an e-mail address for Charley MacArthur, but our message bounced back. Could there be two Robin nests? Or are these two stories related?
Manx meanderings
From the January issue, the mystery of the three Meyers Manx SR roadsters photographed somewhere in the desert Southwest has been cleared up. It seems that they belong to Matthew Scruton, Manx SR collector and webmaster for the enthusiast site www.manxsr.com. After a call from a friend who had seen the photos, Scruton called to tell us that the cars--two from California, and one from Utah--were en route to his house in Rochester, New Hampshire, not so far from our offices here in Bennington, Vermont. It's a small world, after all. He tells us that Meyers sold these fiberglass-bodied cars in kit form only, and that in addition to the usual Volkswagen engine, home builders sometimes used Corvair, Porsche or even Subaru power.
Czech engine, light
Here's a puzzler from the archives of Modern Mechanix magazine. In a feature titled "Three New Lightweight Automobiles for Europeans," the magazine showed off the Dynavia, the 1949 Citroën 2CV, and this three-wheeled charmer, driven by an apparently unhappy man in suit and tie as what seem to be extras from the cast of Hogan's Heroes look on. Here's the relevant text: "More evidence that Europeans will continue to drive small, economical cars is evidenced by three new models. Czechs in Prague are holding a contest to find an inexpensive car that is cheap to operate.... One lightweight Czech car has a two-cylinder engine in the rear and attains a speed of 50 mph. It is said to run 63 miles on one gallon of gasoline." The only Czech microcar we could find in our reference materials was the Velorex, and this is not one of those. We even asked our local microcar maven, who gave us the mechanic's shrug. So, who recognizes this beacon of post-war Czech motoring freedom?

This article originally appeared in the April, 2007 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.